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Ed McBain

“Evan Hunter is Ed McBain”

Evan Hunter (10/15/1926 – 6/6/2005)

Hunter was a man of many pseudonyms.
Born Salvatore Lombino, he adopted the name Evan Hunter for personal and
professional reasons in his mid-twenties. Other names, Curt Cannon, John
Abbott, Richard Marsten, were used when needed to either draw a distinction
between the styles of his writing, disguise the truth authorship of the stories
and make them more saleable to editors of literary firms who knew him from
within the industry (as Lombino, he worked in a literary agency), or to
increase the chances of selling them – a trick that worked, with a number of
different stories by different ‘authors’ all appearing in the same magazine,
and all in reality produced by Lombino’s hand. After using the pseudonym Evan
Hunter for a novel, he legally adopted it as his name.

By far his most recognisable pseudonym
and the one that often eclipsed his actual name, was that of Ed McBain, author
of the 87th Precinct series of police procedural novels. Hunter’s
novel, “The Blackboard Jungle” was a best-seller in the mid-Fifties, and the
film of it loom larged in the cultural landscape at the time, bringing “Rock
around the Clock” into cinemas (and teenage ears) all over the world. When the
first 87th Precinct novel appeared in 1956, the tone and subject
matter were so distinctly different, that a separate and distinct name for the
author was a logical step and the somewhat hard-boiled Ed McBain was born.

Hunter kept writing until his death in
2005, not only carrying on the 87th Precinct series, but introducing
the attorney, Matthew Hope as well as other stand-alone stories. He always
wrote plays, TV scripts and adaptations and adapted works for the cinema. Most
famous of these was The Birds (1963), based on the Daphne du Maurier story,
directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Hunter also began the screenplay for Marnie the
following year, but departed from the project after a disagreement with the
director. One of Hunter’s autobiographies, Me and Hitch (1997) outlines their
relationship.

There are plenty of resources available
on the web, interviews, transcripts, programmes and quotes that you can use to
fill in the gaps in Hunter’s life. He himself would often talk about his work,
his health, his relationships in the various radio or print interviews he
conducted and it is worth seeking these out (see the links page for some of
them). He had an enormous impact on the storytelling landscape and, with the 87th
Precinct series, created one of the most addictive bodies of work of any
author.